Pimp Mobile

Craigslist shuts its "adult" section. Where will sex ads go now?

Friday evening, after years of vilification for allegedly fostering sexual abuse, Craigslist shut down its "adult services" section. The company slapped a "censored" label over the section and went silent. It has ignored all media queries seeking an explanation.

Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

Why the defiant label? Why the silence? What's going on?

Here's a theory. For some time, Craigslist has urged its critics to focus on other companies that do less to screen ads for sexual abuse. It claimed that if its sex-ad business were shut down, buyers and sellers would relocate to these outlets. That argument failed to sway the critics. So Craigslist is forcing the issue. It's exposing where the ads will go once "adult services" is closed. And by getting out of the way, it's challenging human-trafficking activists and state attorneys general to shift their scrutiny to other sites that host such ads.

The attorneys general summarized their case against the company in a letter (PDF) two weeks ago. They charged that "ads for prostitution—including ads trafficking children—are rampant" on the site. They noted that Craigslist had been dubbed "the Wal-Mart of child sex trafficking." They warned that "women and children … will continue to be victimized, in the market and trafficking provided by craigslist." They called the company "the only player in the sex industry who is in a position to stop these ads," and they urged it to "immediately take down" its adult-services section.

Advertisement

Legally, Craigslist is protected by the First Amendment and isn't responsible for ads posted by users. But it has also offered practical and moral arguments. It claims to do several things other sites don't do: "requiring phone verification for every adult service ad," "manually reviewing every adult service ad prior to posting," "creating specialized victim search interfaces for law enforcement," enlisting users to patrol the site for human trafficking, and channeling tips to child-exploitation organizations. As a result, the company says its adult-services section has become the world's best venue for catching sex abusers.

Conversely, Craigslist has warned that if its adult section were quashed, users would relocate to sites that don't follow these practices. CEO Jim Buckmaster claims that when the company began screening ads manually last year, users "left in droves for the numerous venues which do not monitor ads" and "do not cooperate with law enforcement." Such lax competitors, in his view, include "the large mainstream internet portals, the major search engines, large telephone companies (yellow pages), major newspapers, [and] chain operators of alternative weeklies."

The highly explicit photographs included in the following example ads depict young Asian females engaged in unprotected sex, along with rates and a listing of specific sex acts (in Spanish) on offer. DO NOT CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINKS UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO VIEW HARD CORE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES OF UNPROTECTED SEX ACTS!

That's exactly what Buckmaster and Newmark said would happen. Nobody believed them when the scenario was hypothetical. Now that it's real, we'll find out. Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. William Saletan's latest short takes on the news, via Twitter: